Even though a task scheduler can help with alleviating the burden of having to distribute small pieces of work to different threads, it cannot help preventing a few issues common in multi-threaded programming, especially in multi-processor environments.
Continuing from where we left off last time, this post explains how parent-child relationships are handled inside the task scheduler, and how streaming tasks can be split automatically by the scheduler.
In this part of the series, we will discuss Molecule’s task model in detail, and have a look at the underlying C++ code and some subleties we need to watch out for, as well as some unique optimization opportunities.
With multicore hardware becoming the norm in both PC/console-based gaming as well as on mobile platforms, it is crucial to take advantage of every processor core and thread being thrown at us developers. Therefore, it is important to build technology alleviating the task of writing correct, multi-threaded code.
In order to achieve that, this series will try to explain how to build a load-balancing, work-stealing task scheduler.
Molecular Musings 